A new study suggests that financial factors, including couples’ overall resources and wives’ ability to support themselves in the event of a divorce, are not predictive of whether marriages last. Rather, it is couples’ division of labor — paid and unpaid — that is associated with the risk of divorce.

After September 11, issues of immigration and terrorism merged, heightening surveillance and racializing Latino immigrants as a threat to national security, according to sociologists at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin).

It appears that people who actively participate in demonstrations during social movements on behalf of those dissimilar to them do so for two important reasons.

First, they trust their outgroup peers. Secondly, the political climate in their home countries actually fosters both trust and political engagement, and this is particularly true in countries with well-functioning political institutions.

Kansans who own water wells show more awareness of state water policy issues than those who rely on municipal water supplies, according to a study that could have implications for groundwater management and environmental policies.

Brock Ternes, a University of Kansas doctoral student in sociology, found that well owners prioritized issues related to the depletion of the High Plains Aquifer — which is the underground reservoir of freshwater beneath much of the western half of the state.

Immigrants detained in a privately run detention facility while awaiting deportation decisions are far less likely than those held in county or city jails to receive visits from their children, a new study finds.

For years, social science research has revealed a seemingly paradoxical pattern in which educational attainment of immigrant children, even with language and cultural disadvantages, surpasses that of their native-born same socio-economic status peers. This is known as the immigrant paradox in education. Based on these findings scholars have suggested that Americanization is a developmental risk and have raised concerns that United States culture is inferior in some ways to other national cultures.

A special electronic collection of articles from the Fall 2009 and Winter 2010 issues of Contexts on the topic of aging. Featuring Vincent J. Roscigno, Phyllis Moen, Eric Utne, Deborah Carr, Stacy Torres and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society. 28 pages, March 2010.

New editors Syed Ali and Philip Cohen start their tenure with a bang, including articles on carrying (and concealing) weapons, on the lessons of Ferguson, and what uprisings in France can teach us about protests in the U.S. Also: lesbian geographies, Piketty in perspective, recollections of genocide, and “velvet rope racism” at urban nightclubs.